The Alphabet Murders

by Lars Schutz

  ‘We went through all the missing persons cases in the area. No hits.’

  ‘Then widen the search. Temporally and geographically. And concentrate primarily on people who work with books or have some other connection to language.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Think about the previous victims’ jobs.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Exactly. Oh.’

  ‘Anything else?’ she probed. ‘Oh, by the way. I’m moving into the wildlife park hotel too. Koblenz is a bit too far from the action.’

  ‘Great, we’ll finally be sleeping under one roof again,’ remarked Jan sarcastically. ‘And no, I don’t have anything else. I’ll nose around here a bit more, though.’

  ‘Fine. Keep me in the loop.’

  He put the phone away and wandered on through the house, trying to put himself in Zanetti’s shoes. The final hours before his death. Was it he who had inspired the murderer? Had they known each other? If so, then why had the killer treated him as so insignificant? Zanetti was only ‘C’, one letter out of twenty-six. Not ‘A’ or ‘Z’.

  All three victims had known each other, but that didn’t mean they also knew the killer. Maybe he’d been watching one of them and found the others that way.

  The killer planned where to keep them and where to carry out his crime very precisely, although the way he’d killed them indicated impulsive behaviour. It wasn’t a consistent profile. Were they dealing with two killers? A schizophrenic personality?

  Jan sighed. He wasn’t getting anywhere. He sat down on the steps by the front door. His hand slipped briefly underneath his coat, to the baggie with his joint. He toyed with the thought of taking a few puffs, but it would be impossible in front of his colleagues. Yet it was the only thing that calmed him down. The only thing that temporarily stopped the flood of symbols.

  All at once, he wanted to leave.

  Somewhere out there, the Alphabet Killer already had his next victim in his sights.

  22

  First came the cold. Then hunger and thirst.

  ‘A . . . B . . . C . . . D.’

  The echo of the man’s voice roared in Tugba’s head. She didn’t know what the letters meant.

  She didn’t know anything at all. Where she was. Why she was lying in the darkness and cold. How much time had passed. She only knew she was in danger.

  There’s no shame in not knowing, only in not learning. The old proverb her baba had told her.

  She needed information. It might be her only chance. She ignored the hunger gnawing deep inside her. The burning thirst that glued her dry tongue to the roof of her mouth. She’d spent the past hours – or was it days? – drifting in and out of consciousness. The last thing she remembered was a feeling of blind panic, of a kind she’d never known before in her life.

  What did she know? The five ‘W’ questions she taught her pupils for their essays.

  She’d been abducted. She didn’t know when or by whom. She didn’t know why. She didn’t know where she was.

  With an effort she began to move. Every muscle in her body was throbbing with pain. The cold had stiffened her joints. Her shoulder knocked against a wall made of rotting wooden boards, which split the basement into two rooms. She was in some sort of tall wooden cage. Tentatively, her fingers explored. Wood on one side, unfinished brick on the other. Above her a thin wire grille. Dank air and the stench of something that reminded her of spoiled potatoes filled the room. There were no windows. She was in a basement.

  Heavy footfalls. The floor above her head vibrated.

  She held her breath, drawing her legs into her body until she was in a kind of upright foetal position.

  A trapdoor opened in the ceiling. Deep blue night air flooded in.

  Through the palm-width gaps between the wooden boards, Tugba could see into the basement room from her dungeon.

  Her tormentor was climbing down a narrow staircase. He switched on a bare bulb, which flickered on with a buzz. The light burned Tugba’s pupils. She squeezed her eyes almost shut, blinking. She could only see vague outlines.

  He was standing with his back turned to her, the hood of his windbreaker pulled down around his face.

  He was here to fetch her. To end it.

  She tried not to make a sound, lifting her numb hands from the wood so that the trembling wouldn’t make them creak. But it was pointless. He knew where she was. He was the one who’d put her there.

  Yet he paid her no heed. All his attention seemed to be fixed on the opposite wall.

  Tugba peered through a different gap, trying to get a better view, although even that tiny movement made her dizzy. Everything spun. Her legs were giving way.

  But she had to watch. Gather information.

  The wall that was so enthralling to her tormentor was covered in dozens of chalk marks. Letters. They were letters. The alphabet. Like in the classroom of a primary school. Beneath each letter was a rectangle.

  Her tormentor reached into the pocket of his windbreaker and took out several pieces of paper. His fingers quivering, he stuck the pieces into the rectangles under A, B and C.

  They were photos. Tugba could barely see them. Blurry close-ups of naked bodies. When she squinted a little, she thought she could make out letters. Blood red and uneven.

  They were bodies. Dead, all of them.

  Tugba lost her balance, cracking her head against the hard, stained mattress. Her breathing was jerky.

  She remembered now. She remembered the pain. The buzzing. Outside, her tormentor began to recite the alphabet.

  ‘A . . . B . . . C . . .’

  Her back. There was something on her back. Her lips trembled as she ran her hand along her spine. The contortion exhausted the last of the strength in her brutalised bones.

  ‘D . . . E . . . F . . .’

  She felt it. A fine line of swollen, itchy skin. Like sunburn, but infinitely worse. She moved her other hand to feel more of the tattoo. To find out its shape.

  It was a—

  ‘G’!

  Her heart skipped a beat.

  Her tormentor was standing directly outside the cage, his face pressed against the boards. Trying to feel the tattoo, she hadn’t heard him approach.

  His face was in the shadows. All she could see was the glint in his eyes. As though he were waiting for something.

  Tugba shrank back into the far corner of the cage, burying her head in her arms. Those eyes. She didn’t want to feel them on her any more.

  She was ‘G’.

  The hunger and cold had vanished. All she felt was the burning letter on her back.

  She’d wanted information.

  Now she knew far too much.

  23

  4th December, morning

  ‘Apart from having worked through the night, I’ve not got much to report. No DNA, no signs of a struggle, nothing.’

  In the fluorescent light of the autopsy room, the bags under Dr Harreiter’s eyes were all too visible.

  Jan sighed. ‘In a case like this, I almost expected that.’

  ‘Still, we’re not completely empty-handed,’ added Harreiter. ‘Follow me!’

  Stüter, Köllner, Rabea, Anita and Jan followed the medical examiner deeper into the white-tiled room.

  Back in Mainz so soon, he thought. The Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Clinic was the nearest place they could conduct a thorough autopsy. They’d set off in the early morning, and Jan had dozed throughout almost the whole journey. The late night was in his bones; three coffees later, he still wasn’t back to normal. He’d ignored the newspapers laid out near the breakfast buffet at the hotel – he shuddered to think of the headlines about their disastrous press conference.

  Their steps reverberated as they walked through the long morgue, past the three victims, who lay on autopsy tables covered in white, formalin-soaked sheets. On smaller tables beside them were plastic tubs containing the organs that had been removed for further examination
.

  Leonard Ziehner. Marek Lünner. Francesco Zanetti.

  ‘A’. ‘B’. ‘C’.

  Hopefully there would be no more names and letters.

  Harreiter and her assistant paused in front of a stainless-steel table. ‘During the autopsies, we found bark inside the mouths of all three victims.’

  On the table were three greyish-brown pieces of bark about the size of Jan’s thumb, bagged and numbered.

  ‘Any idea what kind of tree they come from?’ asked Köllner, resting his chin on his fist.

  Stüter threw him a glance that clearly only said one thing: ‘I ask the questions here.’

  ‘Judging by the structure, I’d guess a linden or maple,’ answered the medical examiner. ‘We’ve already sent a sample to a botanist for a more precise analysis. It’ll take some time, though.’

  ‘Ah, well it’s not like we’re under any time pressure here.’ Stüter was back at the helm. ‘But we know it’s something from the area, nothing exotic.’

  ‘That’s my best guess, at least.’

  ‘Okay.’ Stüter rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘What else do you have for us?’

  ‘I’m fairly confident that the murder weapons are hunting implements. The incision on the first victim’s throat and some of the cuts on the third victim come from a curved blade approximately a hand’s length. Standard part of any hunter’s kit.’

  ‘And the other two victims?’ asked Jan.

  ‘Well, here I’m starting to speculate,’ said Harreiter, enunciating the word ‘speculate’ as though it were a crime. ‘If the knife is a hunting blade, the rope used to hang the second victim could be part of a hoist – the kind used to winch up and bleed an animal.’

  ‘And what was Leonard Ziehner killed with?’ Jan emphasised the publisher’s name. He didn’t like the way Dr Harreiter was only referring to the three dead men as ‘victims’.

  It robbed them of dignity.

  He wanted to give them that, at least.

  The medical examiner assumed a neutral expression. Cutting herself off seemed to be her style. Distancing herself. That, and the brightly coloured Star Trek T-shirt she wore underneath her white coat.

  ‘The haematoma indicates some sort of bludgeon. Also, not uncommon among hunters.’

  ‘At least now we know what weapons we’re after,’ said Stüter. ‘And this thing with the bark—can you make head or tail of that, Mr Analyst?’

  ‘It’s a symbol,’ said Jan. ‘Something very intimate, or he wouldn’t have put it in their mouths. The question is whether there was any intimacy between him and the victims, or whether it’s a message to us. But it’s different from his previous use of symbols. No connection to letters or language.’

  ‘The victims are supposed to swallow it, if you want to put it like that,’ added Rabea, her brow furrowed. ‘A very dominant place to put it, almost sexual.’

  ‘Every new piece of information seems to be more worrying than the one before.’ Anita crossed her arms. She was pale. Jan remembered that she’d never liked visits to the morgue.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ said Harreiter. ‘Two, actually. One, the tattoos were done post mortem, as you suspected. The wounds didn’t start to heal, and there was no reddening. The areas are also not as dry as you’d normally see with tattoos.’

  ‘And the other thing?’ asked Jan.

  ‘The killer didn’t use tattoo ink.’

  ‘What did he use?’

  ‘Ordinary fountain-pen ink. The kind you’d find in any school. Probably the tattoos wouldn’t even have been permanent. But sadly, that doesn’t matter now, of course —’

  ‘Sounds like prison tattoos,’ remarked Ichigawa.

  ‘It’s another message, in any case. Fountain pen ink, of all things. He really is into writing.’ Jan felt a band of pressure around his skull.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Rabea.

  ‘I’ve got to think it over.’

  The medical examiner made a bow. ‘That’s all from our side, folks. You can read all about it in the autopsy report as well. I’ve already filed it with the senior administrator.’

  They said their goodbyes, removed their white coats and left the Institute, emerging back into the realm of the living. Two laughing students came towards them in the car park, while children were throwing snowballs in the park nearby. A total contrast to the white-tiled hermetic silence of the morgue. Jan felt like a foreign body. An apparition from some other, darker world.

  ‘Was worth the trip, anyway,’ said Stüter in the car park. ‘We now know he owns hunting gear.’

  Jan hated raining on people’s parades. ‘That doesn’t help us at all.’

  ‘It’s concrete evidence. What else is going to help us?’ snapped Stüter.

  Jan rolled his eyes.

  ‘Let him talk,’ said Anita.

  Until now she’d been quiet, typing something abstractedly into her phone.

  He threw her a brief, grateful glance and turned back to the group. ‘Here in Westerwald hunters are ten a penny. Even my dad and brother had hunting licences. The weapons are a clue, of course, but only a minor one.’

  ‘Plus, the ranger at the wildlife park told us somebody’d been practising by killing animals,’ added Rabea. ‘If we assume it was our killer, then he’s not a seasoned hunter.’

  Stüter leant against his car with a sigh. ‘You’re both right, of course, about the hunting gear—’

  ‘So, we’ll focus on the weird bark and fountain-pen ink first, then,’ piped up Köllner, his protégé.

  It seemed to Jan the investigation team was in free fall, and every tiny twig they grasped immediately snapped. The only question was how long the drop would be.

  ‘Yes, Ichigawa here. What’s the latest?’ Anita fell back a few paces, her Samsung pressed to her ear. For a moment she lost the usually meticulous control of her expression, and her eyes flew wide. Ending the call a few seconds later, she stared at Jan. ‘You were right.’

  Jan’s heart began to race. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘A missing person has just been reported in Montabaur. Fits your pattern. Tugba Ekiz, thirty-two. Teaches German literature.’

  24

  On one point, science was unanimous: time travel was an impossibility.

  Jan, however, had to disagree. As his Mercedes passed the sign announcing their entry into Hardt, the car transformed into a perfect time machine.

  With every foot the vehicle rolled over the asphalt, the past opened up before him.

  His home village.

  The prodigal son returned.

  He still remembered the moment he’d left. Two days before the funeral. Too late to avoid all the gossip. Far too soon to silence it.

  That had been December, too. The sky that day hadn’t been a leaden grey like today, but a clear blue. A total contrast with Jan’s emotional world as he’d driven towards Bochum in the rented VW Polo.

  Jan tapped the wheel with his fingertips. It would be so easy to turn back. A U-turn – nobody else was on the road anyway – and he’d be headed back to Hachenburg.

  But he couldn’t do that. His name had been haunting the radio and television waves since yesterday, and his face had even made the front page of several newspapers.

  They already knew he was here. Just a brief family visit. He owed them that.

  On the way back from Mainz he’d told Rabea he needed to slip away for an hour. That she’d have to do the interview with the person who’d reported Tugba Ekiz missing.

  She’d asked, of course, where he was going.

  He, of course, had made a secret of it.

  Even though he might as well have told her. It made no difference. Yet he’d always been a loner. He preferred to sort things out by himself. Or maybe he was simply better at self-deception than other people.

  He turned down Kirchstrasse – Church Street. As a child he’d always asked why it was called that, even though there was no church on it.

  When he left t
here’d only been five buildings on that road, one of which was his family’s barn. Now there were more than he could count at a glance.

  There were a lot of new-builds. A row of smart detached homes lined both sides of the asphalt. Houses with signs outside that said things like This is where Papa Dirk, Mama Katja, Finn-Lukas and Ann-Sophie live, love and argue. Home-owning families who earned loyalty points with all sorts of different shops, who watched Germany’s Got Talent on Saturday nights, who separated out their recycling with painstaking care.

  A life he’d never been able to contemplate.

  He didn’t even recognise his brother’s house. When he left, their parents’ former home had been in the middle of renovations and completely covered in scaffolding. His brother had wanted to turn it into a home for his small family. Now it glowed a pale beige, with wooden window frames and solar panels on the roof.

  Only the barn, slightly to the right of the house, was as dilapidated as in Jan’s youth. Cobwebs hung like curtains in the windows, and the unfinished brick walls were thick with the grime and memories of generations.

  As a small child, his brother had told him ghost stories about the ruin, about a haunted place of corpses and headless virgins.

  His older brother had always been a good storyteller. Somebody who understood intuitively how to captivate his audience. As would also become apparent later in their lives.

  Everything had always been about Gero. Jan had merely been the tiny satellite that orbited him. In school, where he’d had to follow in his much-too-big footsteps. With girls, who’d only ever used him so his brother would notice them.

  He sighed, brushing the memories aside. His thigh was aching again. The old phantom pain. He halted the Mercedes outside the front door. The first chords of Driving Home for Christmas were already playing on the radio as he switched off the engine.

  He followed the path, neatly shovelled clear of snow, through the front garden. A plastic figurine of Santa’s sleigh was parked to the right of the paving stones, harnessed to six reindeer. In the Christmas decoration competition that had apparently broken out in the neighbourhood, however, the solitary vehicle lagged behind. He was about to climb the steps to the front door when the barn door opened with its familiar squeak.